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The School Nutrition Association, which has allied itself with big food companies in an effort to weaken a four-year old federal law requiring healthier school lunches, has suffered the latest in series of embarrassing defections by prominent members and former leaders.

More than 200 national, state and local organizations and dozens of health professionals signed onto a letter declaring their support for an amendment proposed by Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) to protect federal school nutrition standards. Farr’s proposal aims to fend off efforts to weaken those standards when Congress votes on the upcoming agriculture appropriations bill.

Corn is in the food we eat, the soda we drink, the gas we buy, plastics, cleaners – it’s everywhere.

Producing all that corn is a $1.7 trillion industry in the United States, and as a new report documents, it’s one that takes a tremendous toll on the environment and is under threat from water shortages and climate change. But federal policies continue to encourage corn growers and corn-based industries to stay on an unsustainable course.

EWG’s recent report, “Ethanol’s Broken Promise,” came under attack last week (June 12) by researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory who challenged our conclusion that reducing the amount of corn ethanol blended into gasoline will reduce the carbon emissions that intensify global warming.

In the ongoing campaign to get Congress to weaken federal requirements for healthier school lunches and snacks, the School Nutrition Association is trying to create the impression that it speaks for the nation’s “lunch ladies,” the hundreds of thousands of women and men who prepare and serve food to children in schools.

When people think about the causes of global warming, the food they eat typically doesn’t make the short list. But agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of human-caused emissions of nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

And now a new study by researchers at Michigan State University shows that using more fertilizers than crops need is even more harmful to the climate than previous estimates indicated.

The Renewable Fuels Association, a well-funded lobbyist group for Big Ethanol, recently responded to EWG’s report, Ethanol’s Broken Promise, by claiming that corn ethanol isn’t worse for the climate than gasoline.

The Environmental Protection Agency appears poised to approve Dow Chemical’s bid to market a new toxic weed killer based on an agency analysis that failed to consider its danger to children’s health, as federal law requires.

The Obama Administration is right to demand cuts to greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. But those reductions won’t be a reality until 2030. If the Administration wants to cut emissions right now, the Environmental Protection Agency should move ahead with its plan to reduce the amount of corn ethanol blended into gasoline.

Taking 580,000 cars and trucks off the road would reduce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. And something like that would happen if a proposal by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency becomes reality.

Will Coggin, a senior research analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom, wrote in The Hill last week that “Vermont became the first state to mandate de facto warning labels on genetically improved foods (GIFs), also referred to as GMOs.”

The USDA Inspector General’s audit, released earlier this month, found that the heavily-subsidized crop insurance program suffered from an error rate for improper payments of at least 5.23 percent. The audit said the actual number could be higher. And it’s significantly up from last year’s error rate of 4.08 percent.

Although Minnesota has a unique policy designed to curb agricultural water pollution by requiring a 50-foot buffer zone between farmland and the state’s river and stream banks, less than a fifth of the waterways in the southern part of the state are fully protected, an Environmental Working Group report shows.

Just days after Congressional leaders installed a statue of agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug in the U.S. Capitol, the head of the International Panel on Climate Change made the startling assertion that Borlaug’s ideas for feeding millions of people were losing relevance.